Frieze

We’re not in London for the 14th Frieze art fair, which opens to the public tomorrow. But VIP preview guests have already thoroughly documented the fair via social media. Just what trends are catching the eyes of these discerning Instagrammers? Anything and everything pink, installations that harken back to the days before Brick Lane felt like a high-end high street, genitals (obviously), shelving (less obviously), and one very popular living blow-up-doll.

Hot times, summer in the city. Due to an air-conditioner outage and temperatures expected to be in the nineties, the Brooklyn Museum will be closed this weekend. [New York Times]

Eric Shiner, the director of the Warhol Museum, will be leaving to join Sotheby’s. He has held the position since 2011 and will now be Senior Vice President of the new Division of Fine Art. [Artforum]

Frieze is getting shorter next year. Organizers say that the 2017 edition will only be four days rather than the usual five in order to reduce the burden on galleries. Ben Davis reports on the various factors going into the decision. [artnet News]

Jeffrey Deitch has officially announced his plans for reopening the 18 Wooster St. location that was previously home to Deitch Projects. The new/old space will kick off with a series of performances by Eddie Peake that will run September 8-10th and it will not be running on a standard gallery model of representing artists. Despite the very public and acrimonious conflicts that were part of his time as head of the LACMA, Deitch says, “I rented the Wooster Street gallery to the Swiss Institute for five years, and figured that would cover my journey to Los Angeles. I always intended to come back.” [The Art Newspaper]

In advance of its official 2020 opening date, The Main Museum of Los Angeles is offering public programming through “Beta Main”, a sort of preview of what to expect when the new institution opens in its official digs. [Los Angeles Times]

The Second Avenue Subway’s 86th Street station is going to feature huge mosaics by Chuck Close. This is good news if you’re a Chuck Close fan, I guess. [Curbed]

Fairphone—the Dutch phone manufacturing startup that hopes to make the electronics industry less evil—is getting attention even from The Wall Street Journal, print bastion of capitalism. [The Wall Street Journal]

The Guggenheim’s exhibition Åzone Futures Marketis essentially an exchange for a new cryptocurrency developed collaboratively. Even after reading this twice, I’m still not sure what this means. Is the message behind all these artist forays into financial markets that no currency makes sense and the economy is totally arbitrary? [Hyperallergic]

Memes generated by an AI are the best memes. Meet Shitpostbot 5000, the internet’s least self-aware content generator. [Geek.com]

Brooklyn’s Trestle Gallery is seeking a new Curator in Residency. [Trestle]

Well this is depressing. Here’s a map that shows which neighborhoods in New York City gentrified the most between 1990-2014. WIlliamsburg/Greenpoint saw average rents increase a staggering 78.8%. There are only seven areas in the entire city that aren’t classified as “gentrifying” or already “higher income” and they’re all so inconveniently located. Fuck. [Curbed]

An artwork by Staten Island high school students Meghan Callahan-Scarcella and Andrea Gonzalez has been removed from an exhibition at Susan E. Wagner High School. The pair collaborated on a photo collage of anti-rape messages written across female students’ backs. Ridiculously, the school administration claimed this was obscene and that the piece be taken down. [National Coalition Against Censorship]

Vogue went to Frieze to photograph “street” fashion, which to be honest, was a lot more interesting than most of the art. Somehow, they missed the attendee accessorizing with stiletto boots and a newborn baby. [Vogue]

It’s official: the top tier of the art market is contracting. Sotheby’s annual impressionist and modern sale plunged a year-to-year 61%, totalling “only” $144.5 million. Compare that to last year, when Christie’s sold just one Picasso painting for $179.4 million. This year, about a third of lots didn’t even sell. [Bloomberg]

Meanwhile at Christie’s, at least something generated interest. Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture of Adolf Hitler sold for $17.2 million to an anonymous bidder via surrogates on the phone. Everyone’s guessing who the lucky new owner could be. François-Henri Pinault, Christie’s owner who is opening his own Parisian museum? Perhaps Qatari Sheik Khalifa Al-Thani, who just dropped millions building his own museum to fill? [Page Six]

Nate Freeman explains the long, surreal history of Jordan Wolfson’s latest creepy robot installation, now on view at David Zwirner. Is this thing beautiful? Horrible? We’ll have to see it ourselves, but we now know it was birthed in a Southern California industrial park that looks like an airplane hangar. [ART News]

One could more or less have the same experience of Frieze by looking at documentation of most of the work. This, despite the fact that visitors can sample dystopian “food” products and see a live donkey (sometimes).

Here we go again. Put on your best black outfit and prepare to network! It’s Frieze Week in New York. The collectors will be out buying. The dealers will be out dealing. And the press will be out chattering.

As per usual, we’ve put together our annual art fair guide. We don’t promise it will be the comprehensive guide you’ll find. There are other blogs out there for that. But we do promise that we won’t waste your time. If a fair’s not worth your time, we’ll let you know.

This is not the week to let your inner researcher go crazy. It’s Frieze week, which means there’s a mountain of events, all of which will seem essential to visit. After spending the day combing through all the talks, the openings, and the fairs we have a little secret we can let you in on. Very little of what we’ve read about constitutes a “must-see” for the average artist. We’ve gone through and selected what we think is actually relevant to artists. That means there are no galas, no co-branding kick-off parties, and no invitation-only events we can’t attend anyway. What we do recommend is Meg Webster’s 70-foot bee magnet at Socrates Sculpture Center, a round table discussion on why artist-run galleries are the bomb, and a Chucky-like doll by Jordan Wolfson we’re pretty sure will scare the crap out of you. Brace yourself.

It’s the 10th anniversary of the 2006 Youtube sensation “Shoes” by actor Liam Kyle Sullivan. Not sure the video tells us too much about the internet 10 years ago, though it is a good reminder that Peaches and more generally electroclash were widely popular. The music video, which is about a teenage character named “Kelly” who likes shoes and parties, still holds up. [The Onion AV Club]

Ann Freedman, former director of the scandal-ridden Knoedler Gallery, has given her side again, and what she reveals, is well, not much. Her much-anticipated testimony in the trial over the $8.3 million sale of a fake Rothko to Domenico and Eleanore De Sole was averted when the gallery and collectors settled out of court in February. Expectedly, Freedman confesses she didn’t know any of the works she sold were fakes, and while she says she’s sorry, adds “but let me be clear, this is [about] works of art. I didn’t slay anybody’s first-born. We have to have some perspective on suffering.” While six lawsuits have been settled against Knoedler for all the fakes they sold, four are still active. [Art Newspaper]

Finally, a listicle we can get behind: 10 Awful Public Art Pieces. [Houston Press]

The art market is ripe for abuse, say some. High quality global journalism requires investment. “There were huge steps towards greater transparency in the past 20 years,” says Clare McAndrew, author of the TEFAF Art Market report. “But in the past couple of years it has been going backwards.” Apparently, the trend of private sales at auction houses has created problems as has an unwillingness of private galleries to participate in surveys about purchasing. [FT.com via Art Market Monitor]

Jerry Saltz interviews James Franco. The crux of it seems to be that Franco has been unfairly persecuted in the art world because he’s an A-List actor who’s also an artist and scored his first show at a blue chip with conceptually weak work. The cruelties of the world continue: Jay Z was also unfairly persecuted, for shooting “Picasso Baby” at Pace filled with art world celeb cameos. What planet are these two on? There’s a tiny bit of talk about how Franco’s work wasn’t that strong, but come on. He remade Cindy Sherman photographs and showed them at Pace. Terrible. Franco says the gallery was embarrassed by the show, which HELLO. Of course they were. James Franco describes Art F City as “particularly nasty”. [NY Magazine]

Somewhat tangentially related, but Franco’s talent agency, WME | IMG, have bought a stake in in Frieze. The power-house agency, run by the inspiration for Entourage’s Ari Gold, will now sponsor the Frieze Tate Fund, providing the Tate with $213,000 for acquisitions. Beyond that, this all basically means you’ll see more celebrities at the fair previews, and the parties will be even more of a hassle to get into. [Artforum]

Carlos Rigau (above) wants you to make a painting. He also squatted one of Miami’s many empty “investment properties” with the writer of this article about him, Rob Goyanes. [Temporary Art Review]

Just to clear up any confusion, James Turrell wants us to know that he definitely had nothing to do with Drake’s new music video [Blouin artinfo]

Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian are setting aside any rivalries to collaborate on an exhibition of figurative work from the 1980s. It will open during Art Basel Miami Beach in the Design District, not a fair booth. [Miami New Times]

A dark cloud shifted over FIAC’s VIP preview yesterday with news that next year’s Frieze London will be bumped earlier in the month to avoid clashing with Yom Kippur, leaving only nine days in between. One gallerist thinks this won’t be a big deal for the “real” collectors, but another thinks 50% of American collectors will have to choose where they’ll go. Mo money mo problems! [Art Newspaper]

ArtReview’s Power List is out. I guess we’re supposed to be interested in the small incremental changes on this thing. [ArtReview ]

The Basquiat estate is releasing an edition of 60 $50,000 prints through Pace Prints. The announcement was somewhat shrouded in secrecy until today. Now the mystery remains:who is going to pay $50,000 for a print that wasn’t even technically authored by the artist? [artnet News]

Turns out that new eye in speech bubble emoji is part of an anti-bullying campaign. [Wired]

Debating an MFA? Here’s a ranking of best rankings of grad schools for artists. [Hyperallergic]

New York City is changing it’s streetlights, slowly, to whiter, brighter, more energy-efficient LEDs. It’s a move that’s going to totally change how huge swaths of the city look at night. Some people are really, really unhappy about this. [The New York Times]

The fourth and final episode of Lorna Mills’s Ways of Something is premiering at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center tonight, but guess what? You can watch online minute #27 by Jacob Ciocci. [Vimeo]